In mobile networks different types of mobile services are provided for the users of mobile terminals connected to the mobile networks through different types of gateway elements. Both the operators themselves and external service providers provide the services.
Operators have several gateway elements and other systems for delivering and managing different types of value added service traffic (for example SMS, MMS, WAP, HTTP, e-mail and so forth). In order to better manage the various services, the operators are currently consolidating their mobile value added services into one Service Delivery Platform (SDP). The platform comprises all required functionality for connectivity, transaction management, service management, billing, logging and so forth and consists of several systems performing specific functions. External service providers obtain access to mobile terminals by connecting to such SDPs.
Service Delivery Platform concept is not yet fully established and defined—different market players understand it differently. SDP may mean all or some of the following:                A system and processes for cost-effective and speedy creation, deployment, provisioning, execution, management and billing of a set of services.        In addition to the above, also an infrastructure that delivers packet-based voice and data centric advanced services in a device agnostic and network agnostic manner.        A set of platforms that aggregate different network capabilities and services, and content sources, and thus allow application developers a simplified, uniform/standard way to access such capabilities, services and content.        An infrastructure that inter-works well with IT infrastructure (BSS, Business Support System) such as a billing system, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), AAA (Access, Authorization and Accounting), OSS (Operations Support System) infrastructure such as provisioning. Network elements such as switches, SMSC, MMSC, and WAP Gateways.        
Currently, the service delivery platforms are built by the operator or a system integrator from products, which may be from different vendors. Every component or node of the platform may be from a different vendor or, alternatively, the platform may be provided by a single vendor. Nevertheless, even if the whole platform is from a single vendor, some of the nodes may be out-sourced, subcontracted or purchased from some other vendor. Because different nodes are from different sources, there is no common management concept available for the platform. That is, every node has its own management interface and every node produces its own statistics.
For this reason, in many implementations every node of an SDP needs to be managed separately. That is, every node provides its own interface and administrators of the SDPs use only these interfaces. This is clearly burdensome, since administrators need to learn to use various different interfaces: they need to be aware of several different management concepts, know how to use different user interfaces and understand different statistics. Therefore, a lot of documentation and practice is needed. Furthermore, such separated management is error prone and integration to separate management systems is time consuming and expensive.
An example of an implementation with separate management for each SDP node is shown in FIG. 1. The system comprises two SDP nodes 101 and 102 in an operator network. The SDP nodes may be for example an MMS gateway and a WAP gateway. Service providers 104 and 105 are respectfully connected to the SDP nodes 101 and 102 over Internet. By means of the functionality provided by the SDP nodes these service providers provide services to mobile subscribers 106 and 107, which are connected to the SDP nodes via mobile network. Herein it must be noted that the SDP nodes need not be physically separate devices. Alternatively, they may be software processes running on the same server. Further one service provider may be connected to more than one SDP node and equally one mobile subscriber may be connected to more that one SDP node.
In this system an administrator person 103 responsible for the SDP nodes uses management interface of the SDP nodes 101 and 102 separately in order to control their operation.
In order to improve this situation solutions, wherein SDP nodes have been integrated into a common external management system, have been introduced. An example of such a system is SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) monitoring tools. Most of the node management can be done through such external system and the administrators can use mainly the external system. Nevertheless, some problem situations need to be solved by accessing the nodes directly via their own management interface.
An example of an implementation with such common external management system is shown in FIG. 2. The system is otherwise similar to the system of FIG. 1 but now the system comprises a management tool 200, which is connected to the SDP nodes 101 and 102 and which consolidates some of the management operations of the SDP nodes into one interface. Now the administrator person 103 may conduct some management operations, such as checking system status and clearing error conditions, via common management tool, but nevertheless, some other operations, such as viewing log information, changing configuration, starting, and stopping and restarting services, need to be done directly via management interface of the individual SDP nodes.
The problem with this solution is that the integration operation is expensive and that there are no guarantees of success. The solution may break down when a node is upgraded and adding new nodes may require redesigning of the whole system. Moreover, usually all management operations cannot be integrated and it may be impossible to integrate some components at any level. Still another problem is that node error situations may cause problems in the external management system.
Thereby there is a need to develop a new solution for management of SDP nodes.